Why Trump Is Ready to Send Missiles to Ukraine

During his re-election campaign, President Trump promised voters that he'd end the war in Ukraine.

It was a promise Trump made repeatedly in speeches.

Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, shortly after we win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled.

Rallies.

I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled.

I'll get it done in 24 hours, I know.

And the presidential debate.

That is a war that's dying to be settled.

I will get it settled before I even become president.

If I win, when I'm president-elect, and what I'll do is I'll speak to one, I'll speak to the other, I'll get them together, that war would have been ended.

Trump's plan for settling the war in Ukraine was to get both sides to the negotiating table.

specifically Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

When Trump came into office, he had this idea that he was going to be the person that negotiated peace for this long-standing war with so many fatalities.

That's our colleague, Laura Seligman.

She covers the Pentagon and the White House.

He thought that because he has a personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, that if you just got them in a room together, gave them enough time, he could do it.

He could end the war and end the suffering.

But after nearly six months in office, Trump hasn't been able to get Ukraine and Russia any closer to peace.

And he's grown increasingly frustrated with Putin.

That was a war that should have never happened and a lot of people are dying and it should end.

And I don't know,

we get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin for you want to know the truth.

In the past week, Trump has started taking action against Russia.

He's struck a new weapons deal with Ukraine and threatened to hit Russia with tariffs unless it agrees to a peace deal in 50 days.

Trump finally realized that Putin was not negotiating in good faith and that he never intended to end the war.

He's just decided that talking is not going to cut it, and he is now taking action to support Ukraine.

That idea that talking is not getting us anywhere, I think that's what's been driving sort of his reversal on Putin.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Jessica Mendoza.

It's Wednesday, July 16th.

Coming up on the show, how Trump Soured on Putin over the war in Ukraine.

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When Trump took office in January, he set out to bring the war in Ukraine to an end.

To make that happen, he needed to bring both Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table.

And neither has wanted to cede any ground.

Russia wants to control Ukraine by demilitarizing the country and reasserting Russia's dominance over its politics.

Ukraine wants to stay independent.

It wants to get back a lot of the territory Russia has seized.

And it wants security guarantees, something to make sure Russia can't launch another attack on Ukraine in the future.

Those competing interests made it challenging for Trump to broker a deal.

But he had an important piece of leverage, weapons.

So the Biden team has sent billions and billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine and increasingly over the course of the administration, more lethal, more expensive, more sophisticated weapons to the point where we were sending Patriot air defense systems.

We were sending Abrams tanks or sending F-16 fighter jets.

We're sending the best stuff.

Trump, he didn't like that Biden was giving so many weapons to Ukraine as he saw it for free.

Trump has successfully portrayed it as we are just giving them our weapons and we're not getting anything in return.

And then Trump came into office and he continued to quietly send the packages of weapons that the Biden administration had already authorized.

So a lot of those shipments were still going across the border from Poland, but he hadn't authorized anything new.

So weapons were still going to Ukraine under the Trump administration.

Did the president ever say he would actually stop doing that?

In his actual statements, it was a little bit ambiguous because he's never actually said, you know,

I don't want to help Ukraine, but he's certainly insinuated that he would use American weapons as a negotiating point and has floated the idea of threatening to stop sending U.S.

weapons to Ukraine as a way to get them to the table.

But that strategy has had limited success.

Zelensky accepted a U.S.

proposal for a ceasefire, but Russia did not.

Zelensky has also continued to ask the Trump administration for more weapons to keep fighting.

The slow progress frustrated Trump, and he took it out on Zelensky.

In a social media post in February, Trump called Zelensky a dictator.

Trump also said the Ukrainian president, quote, shouldn't have allowed this war to happen.

Zelensky accused Trump of repeating Russian propaganda.

Later that month, the two leaders met at the White House, where they clashed publicly.

You're right now not in a very good position.

You've allowed yourself to be in a very bad position.

And he happens to be right about the very beginning of the war.

You're not in a good position.

You don't have the cards right now.

With us, you start having a certain amount of time.

So Trump had Zelensky at the White House a couple of months ago, and it just went really badly.

If you didn't have our military equipment,

if you didn't have our military equipment, this war would have been over in two weeks.

In three days.

I heard it from Putin.

In three days, this is something less.

In two weeks, of course, yes.

It's going to be a very hard thing to do business like this.

I can tell you.

Zelensky kept asking for more things, more weapons, more sophisticated weapons.

And Trump was offended by that.

And it was this big blow-up, and Zelensky went home empty-handed.

But you're not acting at all thankful.

And that's not a nice thing.

I'll be honest, that's not a nice thing.

All right.

In March, after that meeting, the U.S.

temporarily paused military aid to Ukraine.

According to a White House official, the pause was to be in place until Trump decided Zelensky was making a good faith effort toward peace talks with Russia.

Trump reversed the pause after about a week.

Around the same time, Zelensky tried to mend his relationship with Trump.

He called the argument regrettable and said Ukraine was ready to renew talks.

On social media, Zelensky wrote, quote, nobody wants peace more than Ukrainians.

A month later, in late April, Zelensky signed a deal that would give the U.S.

rights to minerals in Ukraine in exchange for weapons.

It seemed like Zelensky might have been willing to get to the peace table, but it was Putin that really is the one that's the holdout.

Like he's the one who's still insisting, you know, he's not going to change his aims of conquering all of Ukraine.

According to Wall Street Journal reporting, Putin initially saw Trump as someone he could work with.

After Trump took office, Moscow signaled potential cooperation with Washington on things like energy and space exploration.

Putin even gave Trump a portrait that he commissioned of the U.S.

president.

America's allies in Europe weren't convinced, the journal's reporting found.

Leaders from Germany, France, and Britain warned Trump that Putin was not serious about negotiating and just wanted to seize more territory in Ukraine.

Still, Trump pressed on with attempts at diplomacy.

How is Trump trying to get Putin to the negotiating table?

What was he trying to do?

So, Trump has had a number of calls with Putin over the past couple of months, even reportedly one before he even actually entered office.

And it was clear that Trump wants to deal with Putin personally and is trying to get him to the table to come to some sort of agreement to, as he calls it, stop the killing.

But they never made significant progress.

Even as talks continued, Russia stayed on the offensive.

In one instance, back in April, Russia launched an attack on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv that frustrated Trump.

On social media, Trump wrote: Vladimir, stop.

5,000 soldiers a week are dying.

Let's get the peace deal done.

In that attack, Russia said it was targeting sites that included Ukrainian aviation, rocket, and armored vehicle industries, among others.

And since then, what's the status of the war?

For quite a while now, it's looked like Russia has had the winning edge, although the battlefield progress is very, very slow.

Fighting over villages, fighting over meters of territory on the front.

But it has seemed like Russia has been very slowly pushing in.

And that's been the case for, gosh, probably a year now.

It's not looking good for either side.

Both sides are taking huge casualties still, but Russia just has more

people and more ammunition that they can throw at the war.

So Russia has the upper hand.

Does that make Putin less likely to negotiate?

Putin has one goal and one,

then that's his only goal is to continue the war and conquer Ukraine.

And I don't think anything that Trump was saying was going to change that.

Putin humors Trump, and being on good terms with Trump was a way to get him to stop sending American weapons to Ukraine and make things easier for him.

He thought maybe he could play Trump.

But Trump was losing patience.

And in his latest phone call with Putin, he seems to have reached a breaking point.

That's next.

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Earlier this month, the Pentagon halted a key shipment of weapons to Ukraine.

So the pause was of particular munitions that we were sending Ukraine.

So Patriot air defense interceptors, as well as Hellfire missiles, AIM-120s, and other air defense munitions that are critical for Ukraine to defend itself and defend its cities and infrastructure.

Other weapons were still going through, like tanks and some engineering equipment, but the big holdup was on the munitions.

A White House spokesperson said the decision was made to put America's interests first.

The weapons would be used to beef up the Pentagon stockpile instead.

And what did that mean for Ukraine?

That pause?

I mean, clearly that's devastating for Ukraine.

Anytime they don't get the weapons that they've been promised from the U.S., that you can literally draw a line from that to people dying.

You know, these munitions, they save Ukrainian lives every day.

And if you, they don't have them, that's more people dying.

The move was alarming to Ukraine.

But then Trump had another call with Putin.

How does that call go?

Well, not well.

Trump got off the phone and he talked to reporters and he said he was very disappointed with the phone call.

He said that there was no progress on ending the war.

Yeah, I'm very disappointed with the conversation I had today with President Putin because I don't think he's there.

I don't think he's there.

And the Kremlin actually put out a statement before the White House did saying that Trump had asked him to end the fighting and Putin said no.

So

there's clearly daylight between where they're standing.

And I think that was the point where Trump realized that maybe he was getting played by Putin and he was not successful in his primary goal of getting both sides to negotiate in good faith.

And almost immediately, Trump started to change his approach to the war.

The next day, he called Zelensky.

And unlike their previous interactions, it was a positive call because from our reporting, Trump told Zelensky, you know, it wasn't his decision to pause the weapons and that he would do everything he could to get Ukraine as much as possible.

And Zelensky put out a statement after that saying, really positive call with Trump.

This is great.

Good news all around.

And then since then, Trump has actively worked to come up with a plan that would send weapons to Ukraine.

So what came about is this plan that we heard about on Monday when Trump was in the Oval Office with NATO and he announced that Europe is actually going to pay the U.S.

for its weapons, that then those weapons will go to Ukraine.

Here's NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at that meeting.

This is again Europeans stepping up.

So I've been in contact with many countries.

I can tell you that this moment, Germany massively, but also Finland and Denmark and Sweden and Norway, the North Kingdom, the Netherlands, Canada, they all want to be part of this.

And this is only the first wave.

There will be more.

So again, the big differentiator between what Biden did and what Trump is doing is that the U.S.

is no longer going to be donating weapons.

Can you say more about that?

How is this a big shift from how the Biden administration was handling sending weapons to Ukraine?

It was just sort of from the beginning, you know, Europe and the U.S.

see the Ukraine war as a proxy war with Russia almost.

So we need to do what we can to keep Russia at bay.

And so there wasn't expected to be a payment from that.

The expectation now is like, gosh, three years in, we're still sending weapons for free to Ukraine when we need our own weapons.

The thinking is now, well, Europe should be paying for its own defense.

And if you think about it, that's Trump's MO all along.

from the first administration is to increase Europe's defense spending.

Europe should be paying for its own defense.

And the US has spent so much money sending weapons and other aid to Ukraine that now he believes it's time for Europe to take on more of the burden.

That's always been his thing.

Along with continuing to support Ukraine in the war, Trump announced that the US would also turn the pressure up on Russia.

That pressure would take the form of one of Trump's favorite tactics.

tariffs.

Trump gave Russia a 50-day deadline to agree to a peace deal with Ukraine.

If it doesn't, the U.S.

would impose up to 100% tariffs on Russia and additional tariffs against countries who trade with it.

That increases the economic pressure on Russia as well and sort of underscores his growing anger with Putin.

You know, Trump is famous for setting deadlines and then not necessarily meeting them.

The tariffs threat coupled with this new weapons approach, I think they're hoping that that puts enough pressure on Putin that perhaps he comes to the table.

So what could these weapons, this deal with NATO and these potential terrorists against Russia, all of these together, what could they mean for the future of the war in Ukraine?

Do they improve Ukraine's chances of victory?

They could.

I've covered the war in Ukraine for a long time, the whole time that it's been going on.

And despite having all the best of American weaponry and a lot of it, Ukraine has not been able to win.

You know, there have been times where they've significantly pushed back Russian forces, but in the end, it's a war of attrition and Russia just has more people.

They have more, a bigger defense industry that is able to crank out tanks and ammunition just at a huge rate.

Short of putting U.S.

troops on the ground with U.S.

weapons and U.S.

planes in the sky with U.S.

pilots, I just don't think Ukraine is going to win the war.

They might be able to turn the tide and maybe gain some ground.

And if that happens and diplomats can reach some sort of agreement to bring the sides together at that point, when Putin is sort of on his back foot, then perhaps there's a chance at peace.

But I am pessimistic.

At this point, right now, where does Trump's relationship with Putin stand?

I think it's in a pretty bad place.

Trump is very disappointed that he

could not be the deal maker for peace for Ukraine and Russia, and that he's going to hold that against Putin.

That's all for today, Wednesday, July 16th.

The journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal.

Additional reporting in this episode by Robbie Gramer, Michael R.

Gordon, Matthew Luxemore, Bojan Panchevsky, Yaroslav Trofimov, and Alexander Ward.

Thanks for listening.

See you tomorrow.